20the century string quartets

Lyric Suite - Berg

This work is a autonovel in musical form, following the just barely hidden
love affair between Hanna Fuchs and Alban Berg - and intertwining many
other characters from their circle.  Each character has a specific motif or
rhythm, the most famouns being AB and HF for the two principles.  Cast in
6 movements with progressively wider extreemes of expression, it follows
the spiralling down into despair of its composer.

String Quartet #1 - Schulhoff

Many composers in the early century thought that Jazz would provide
for them what the dancerhythms of Vienna provided for Haydn, Mozart and
Beethoven, a rhythmic platform on which to errect more complex musical
structures.  One of these composers was Erwin Schulhoff, and his first
string quartet is the first work where he pursues thise idea with complete
abandon.  Every movement is filled with pulsation, from languid to rushing.
Its angualrity of form perfectly matching its materials.

Quartets 1 and 2 - Krasna

Krasna's sound world was one of many that took impressionism and inverted,
in a manner similar to young Bartok's.  But given the comparison, Krasna is
better at it that Bartok was, and his modalities more striking in their
ability to depcit shimmering darkness, as a mirror of Debussy's French
Light.

Quartet #1 - Haas

Haas was a string writer in his blood, this quartet is filled with lines,
licks, riffs and ideas, woven together with an inflection that we in the
West would think of as "Central European"" but which, in fact, does not
correspond to any folk system.  Instead, it was a vocabulary oif his own
invention, inspired by the work of Janacek.

Prokofiev - Strinq Quartet #2

Too many things at once. Wonderfully.

- - -

I' surprised we haven't seen a more comprehensive posting on Carter's cycle
of quartets...

Stirling S Newberry
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